12 factor app configuration vs leaking environment variables

gistfile1.txt

App configuration in environment variables: for and against

For (some of these as per the 12 factor principles) 

1) they are are easy to change between deploys without changing any code

2) unlike config files, there is little chance of them being checked
into the code repo accidentally

3) unlike custom config files, or other config mechanisms such as Java
System Properties, they are a language- and OS-agnostic standard."

    http://12factor.net/config

4) because the key and value both have to be plain text, it discourages
adding more complicated things as config settings when they really ought
not to need to be.  Look at any mongoid.yml for example.  Multi-level
config hashes are a code smell (my opinion)


Against:

1) Environment variables are 'exported by default', making it easy to 
do silly things like sending database passwords to Airbrake.  Sure we could
introduce code to filter them out, but it's another thing we need to
remember to update every time we add one - not robust in the face of
code changes.  Better not to put them there in the first place

2) It provides the "illusion of security": env vars are really no more
secure than files, in that if you can read someone's files you can also
(quite easily in Linux) read the environment variables of their running
processes.  This is not to say that files are better, just that they
don't pretend to be.

3) in some respect it's just deferring the problem: in order to start
your production instance those config variables still need to be read
from some source so they can be added to the environment, and 98% of the
time that source will be a local file.

4) if you restart an app by sending it a signal (e.g. SIGHUP) from an 
unrelated shell that causes it to re-exec itself, it will still have the
environment of the original process.  So for example, you can't update
config in environment variables and do a Unicorn "zero downtime" restart.
This can cause confusion

5) There is no single place in which to look to find out what settings are
accepted/required: even successfully starting the app doesn't mean that some code
path somewhere won't dereference an unset env var sometime later.  We don't pass 
parameters into modules using arbitrarily-named and undeclared globals,  so
why is it OK to pass params into the main program that way

My argument:

is that what we're really asking for is a configuration source that

a) lives outside the project.  This requirement could be met by
environment variables or a file in /etc or even a request to a web
server - see e.g. as the AWS instance metadata

http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/AESDG-chapter-instancedata.html

but in any case it should be difficult to accidentally merge production
config values into the project version control.

b) can be easily and reliably read using any of a variety of languages
(including shell scripts and the like) without complicated parsing code
or library dependencies

c) has limits on its expressitivity, so that people aren't trying to add
code that wants hashes and dates and lists and stuff like that as config
values

d) ideally, makes it hard to accidentally send the configuration values
to our collaborators and external services


Is that a fair representation of the arguments for/against, or am I
missing something?

We created Config, a SaaS for managing configuration files. We use an environment variable just to tell use what environment we are in, and use that information to pull the correct configuration file. This is all done during deployment time. The environment can come from the system itself, or taken from an Ansible variable. You can achieve a similar effect with Git, but Config specializes in configuration files, and seamlessly handles commonality and differences between environments.

lol, a SaaS for managing configuration.

hybrid approach seems to work quite well -- env var that determines configuration file source. Storing everything in env vars just moves the goalposts back further [where do the env vars come from? ...a file or deploy service correct?] also doesn't offer any more secure method of secure token storage... pub priv keys for accessing encrypted conf from a deploy service takes care of that.

https://github.com/hashicorp/vault

Moving to almost exclusive use of containerised apps has made me completely convert to settings being set via environment variables (with defaults should they not exist...usually stored in a local config file).
-- I love zombie threads like this that continue to be relevant. :)

re: I love zombie threads like this that continue to be relevant -- they continue to be relevant when the basic question STILL does not have a single obviously correct answer.

This is still a very relevant topic today, indeed.
I haven't found a satisfactory solution to it yet.

BTW, this gist is referenced from https://github.com/juxt/aero/tree/743e9bc495425b4a4a7c780f5e4b09f6680b4e7a#use-environment-variables-sparingly
This Aero library is worth considering, because its authors have really thought this problem domain through.
While it's been made for Clojure programs primarily, it uses the EDN format for declaring a configuration.
There are libraries for processing EDN written in many languages: https://github.com/edn-format/edn/wiki/Implementations

The ideas behind Aero are language independent though, so it's highly recommended to check it out at least.

What I've realized though, the problem of creating and maintaining state in your programs, which rely on configuration, is still not a very well solved problem.
The Clojure community is thinking about such state-management issues and there are numerous approaches to tackle it.
The same company who made Aero, attempts to solve these issues with their https://github.com/juxt/clip library.

re: What iolloyd said (in 2016) values that change depending on the environment should only be available in that environment.

Perhaps it is grammatically persnickety of me, but I'd like to point out that in this context, environment refers to things like:

• production, QA, staging, development, bug_fix_1, Wednesday, ....
• Asia, Europe, North America, Australia, ....
  not to environment variables specifically.

Each of those run-environments may have a custom copy of the configuration file, and that meets the needs of separating configuration state from application code. As well as environment variables and command line parameters, one could have cascading config files. E.g.:

myApp --config=default.cfg --config=devel.cfg --config=test-bug-fix.cfg
myApp --config=default.cfg --config=production.cfg --config=NorthAmerica.cfg --config=UnitedStates.cfg --config=Colorado.cfg

Each file read in order, overriding whatever configuration had been built so far.

I agree with Jesse here, and I would (attempt to) disambiguate it by using the word "installation" (or perhaps "instance") in preference to "environment".

I haven't done more than skin the Aero documentation so far, but it's from Juxt so I assume it's good :-) There's another older and probably better-known precedent for a reasonably systematic way to configure from cascading files/environment variables, which is Ruby's bundle tool.